Global "Body Shopping"

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How can America's information technology (IT) industry predict serious labor shortages while at the same time laying off tens of thousands of employees annually? The answer is the industry's flexible labor management system--a flexibility widely regarded as the modus operandi of global capitalism today. Global qBody Shoppingq explores how flexibility and uncertainty in the IT labor market are constructed and sustained through concrete human actions. Drawing on in-depth field research in southern India and in Australia, and folding an ethnography into a political economy examination, Xiang Biao offers a richly detailed analysis of the India-based global labor management practice known as qbody shopping.q In this practice, a group of consultants--body shops--in different countries works together to recruit IT workers. Body shops then farm out workers to clients as project-based labor; and upon a project's completion they either place the workers with a different client or qbenchq them to await the next placement. Thus, labor is managed globally to serve volatile capital movement. Underpinning this practice are unequal socioeconomic relations on multiple levels. While wealth in the New Economy is created in an increasingly abstract manner, everyday realities--stock markets in New York, benched IT workers in Sydney, dowries in Hyderabad, and women and children in Indian villages--sustain this flexibility.I met Ken in the Sri Venkateswara Temple where he was a volunteer overseeing
the second phase of construction. (40) Keshev, a Telugu chemical engineer in
his mid-thirties, went to Sydney through the family-reunion program in 1999. ...
The oil crisis in the 1970s convinced the family that chemistry would not bring
about any promising international job prospect, and Khrishna joined the Indian
Instituteanbsp;...

Title

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Global "Body Shopping"

Author

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Biao Xiang

Publisher

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Princeton University Press - 2011-05-21

ISBN-13

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